Hongwei

Our entire social contract relies on the a redistribution of wealth from young to old. Boomer Communism, it's currently called.

If you are currently paying taxes, you are funding Medicare and Social Security (insert whatever name for your country). The deal is that when you retire, the next generation funds your entitlements.

If the next generation is not large enough, that deal breaks down, leading to almost impossible political choices. Do we increase taxes on the remaining working population to fund the larger retired one? Do we defund entitlements and tell retirees to figure it out, when they themselves paid into the system that is now bankrupt?

I appreciate PG's writing as always.

I'm skeptical that the super-rich are only generating 5% on their money. My anecdotal experience is that it's usually north of 15%. They have access to investments that main-street does not.

If we plug in 15% instead of 5% in PG's reasoning, the effective income tax increase is quite a bit lower.

Smugness usually turns people off. It doesn’t matter how smart you are. No one likes people who act superior to them. Hilary lost over her “deplorables” comment. It makes me sad that the left is not taking the right lesson from this election.

Is it the critics of performative anti-racism or the actual performers of performative anti-racism who are undermining anti-racism?

RIP. As a Canadian I've always liked that we technically had the Queen as our head of state. I wonder how attitudes will change now that her 70 year reign.

I buy the first, not the second. Retailers often charge consumer packaged goods companies (CPGs) for preferential placement in aisle and carry no risk on inventory. The bigger the retailer (eg. bestbuy, walmart), the more likely they can assume no risk on inventory with a full return policy to the CPG. Best Buy just rents out space on their store floor to individual brands.

Thanks! fixed

Hi! If you're looking for a developer friendly indoor mapping suite (both for editing and viewing/navigating), check us out - www.mappedin.com

Totally agree that it's an overlooked problem and we've been quietly working to solve it for years. Early on we realized the key was to build "everyman" mapping tools that facility managers can use themselves to keep data up to date.

We're increasingly focused on our developer-facing tools and I'd love any feedback if you end up taking a look! (https://www.mappedin.com/mapping/sdks/)

Could be the same timeline, but would still need a mostly new cast. Stargate SG-2 just doesn't have the same ring to it!

I don't know. I would say I'm d) believe that the West cannot and should not enforce a lockdown the same way authoritarian China or Singapore can, and therefore it is doomed to fail.

So: * lockdowns are guaranteed not going to eradicate the virus the way it has in China. * lockdowns are guaranteed to crush small businesses and restaurants, creating an L-shaped economic recovery and putting the West at a disadvantage in future geopolitical conflicts. * the vaccine works but will take a year to rollout to everyone and it is unimaginable that the public will tolerate a lockdown for more than a month * herd immunity might work

I truly welcome any debate on this as I'd love to be wrong about my critique of my country's (Canada) approach to all this. We seem to be not having our cake and not eating it too.

They can if they stop enrolling and paying tuition. There are plenty of options online for college-style certifications that most employers in my industry (software engineering) would accept.

I get that other professional training with certifications would be harder to do online, but those tend to be done in community colleges anyway. The most "abusive" shops are universities offering BS degrees to students swimming in debt.

I hope so too :) And fair enough, thanks for the the kind discussion, I didn't mean to put words in your mouth.

I agree with you that current market incentives do not capture externalities like environmental harm. (eg. soil erosion, in the case of a farmer who doesn't rest his fields)

I hope to convince you to hate the game, not the players. So that we can focus our efforts at the root cause. And to take a measured approach: it's not all bad. I'd rather have our current quality of life (in Canada) than to live in a pre-industrial world in the longhouses of the Aboriginal Peoples who used to live where I do. It seems romantic, but I'm sure I'd be a terrible hunter. I choose to believe that human progress will continue to solve the problems we face, in time. Because historically we always have. Let's root for more Elon Musks instead of hating on the average capitalist.

I agree with you completely. There are certainly rent-seeking businesses that do not create value (or net value?). And the majority of businesses are competing in (disrupting) existing markets.

Even if they don't increase total consumer spending by offering better products and winning market share, they do increase consumer _wealth_. I'm glad I can buy a 65" 4k TV for as much as my parents paid for a 15" CRT 20 years ago, adjusted for inflation.

That's the median outcome. Then you get outliers like the sewing machine that greatly increased the productivity of vast amounts of workers, making those users much richer and society wealthier because clothes got cheaper.

I find it disingenuous to claim, as the OP did (perhaps unintentionally), that innovators are bad faith actors playing a zero sum game. Surely that's the exception, not the norm. Just as there are bad actors in academia and any other profession.

Sorry but I strongly disagree with your assertion that building a business is a zero-sum game. At the basic level, a farmer who sows a field and harvests a crop is making the world one harvest richer, and no one poorer. Ditto for the carpenter making a table or mechanic fixing a car. PG addressed this long ago: http://paulgraham.com/gap.html

Scientists turn money into knowledge. Entrepreneurs turn knowledge into money. It's a virtuous cycle. Scientists lament that they don't get their "fair share" but it's wrong to blame innovators, better to reevaluate their own economic strategy. What if we had private research institutes turning out cutting edge research? Or vertically integrated ones that commercialized their own discoveries, like Spacex?

I've always told people interested in startup to "start a project, not a company." I haven't been able to verbalize why yet until this:

But there is another more sinister reason people dismiss new ideas. If you try something ambitious, many of those around you will hope, consciously or unconsciously, that you'll fail. They worry that if you try something ambitious and succeed, it will put you above them. In some countries this is not just an individual failing but part of the national culture.

Isn't this the standard private equity playbook? Buy, hold, and flip? Though Softbank isn't a VC and I haven't heard of mass cost-cutting after they buy something.

Bombardier has its own problems and is viewed as a corrupt Quebec company by much of English Canada (that is, the rest of us). So the other comments on the political appetite to bail them out again are mostly correct.

[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-world-bank-... [2] https://globalnews.ca/news/3354398/bombardier-trudeau-hammer... [3] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/bombardier-what-happ...

I think the parent comment is implying that college diplomas are better at helping people get a job and earn a living.

Writing 1+ page essays and MLA citation formatting is work that seems to only exist in academia. It wouldn't surprise me if community college educated people transferring to university programs needed a refresher on that stuff.

This may be the last straw that tips politicians over into considering Twitter & co utilities - stuff that the gov has a say in running because failure is unacceptable to the public.

Not that I think the gov could do a better job, but that doesn't stop them elsewhere.

Imagine being on some planet far away, just living your life, and a literal star comes through and ends all life in the system.

For those who don't remember, here's what happened last time: https://www.thestreet.com/technology/rackspace-ipo-starts-ou...

Wish them luck this time!

My parents lost a small fortune in 2001 riding the tech crash down (Nortel was a good chunk of that). I've been trying to explain to them (1st gen Chinese immigrants) for the past three years that Nortel was killed partly by focused Chinese spying and IP-theft by Huawei. CSIS has know about this for years. They (my parents) just wouldn't believe it until I showed them this article.

Their former university classmates (who also immigrated to Canada) are likely part of the 20 people that jumped ship to Huawei and implicitly may have leaked data before then.

I'm glad this article got through to them, that it isn't just politics and Huawei & the CCP really did go offside.

Co-opting universities to teach using Esri tools is a big part of Esri's marketing. They provide those tools to schools below cost, encourage (bribe) profs to incorporate their toolset heavily into their curriculum with free seminars in nice places, and it's often a revolving door between academia and Esri research posts.

Reminds me of the opioid industry!

A cause or symptom (I'm not sure about causality here) is that the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) directly funds most private Canadian VCs. VCs now have public money as part of their LP base, with some strings attached. Most of these strings (eg. don't waste taxpayer money doing anything unethical or overly negligent) will nudge VCs to be more conservative. Plus, the VCs are guaranteed 20%+ of their 2% carry from BDC taking up that much of every fund and don't need to swing for the fences to make a good income.

Canuck here who spends a lot of time in the States (or used to). SLC also has some of the most underrated and inexpensive skiing just 30 minutes out from the airport.

As stated in the video, this was leaked years ago. They're just confirming the authenticity of the videos.

Here's an older, non-region locked video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUT3rgT3P6E

The consequences are supposed to be inflation. Instead, we seem to only get asset inflation (houses, stocks) and not consumer goods inflation (flour). From a former econ prof who I spoke to recently: the central bankers aren't thinking about inequality or inflation right now, they're just trying to avoid the apocalypse.

The liquidity injected is supposed to be taken out later, thus removing the inflationary distortion. Whether it will or not is anyone's guess. 2008's injections have yet to be taken out.

Central banks are easier creditors because, while autonomous, they are the same country as the government! So it's technically like owing yourself money. A central bank that cooperates with the debtor country (itself) would never force a default, and is thus never an acute problem. Of course, infinite money printing should lead to dangerous inflation.

- why tax people?

So that common services (eg. healthcare in Canada, education everywhere, roads) can be collectively paid for.

- why even work? Can't we just print enough money for everyone and live happily ever after?

Because there wouldn't be enough resources. (Fiat) currency is just a medium of exchange for real stuff. Instead of growing wheat and trading it for your wooden furniture, the state provides a medium of exchange so we can both just transact in money. eg. when I don't need more furniture but you still need wheat.

Money =/= wealth

Anyone know who his VP pick will be? I know this won't happen but it'd be funny if he picked Obama.